On the world called Hyperion, beyond the law of the Hegemony of Man, there waits the creature called the Shrike. There are those who worship it. There are those who fear it. And there are those who have vowed to destroy it. In the Valley of the Time Tombs, where huge, brooding structures move backward through time, the Shrike waits for them all.

In a corporate-dominated spacefaring future, planetary missions must be approved and supplied by the Company. Exploratory teams are accompanied by Company-supplied security androids, for their own safety. But in a society where contracts are awarded to the lowest bidder, safety isn’t a primary concern. On a distant planet, a team of scientists are conducting surface tests, shadowed by their Company-supplied ‘droid—a self-aware SecUnit that has hacked its own governor module, and refers to itself (though never out loud) as “Murderbot.”

 The Waste Land is a seminal work of modernist poetry by T.S. Eliot. Written in 1922, this five-part poem is a portrait of its time, a work that expresses the disillusionment of the modernist era and the desperation that the generation of writers of that time was feeling....

Deep in the African rain forest, near the legendary ruins of the Lost City of Zinj, an expedition of eight American geologists are mysteriously and brutally killed in a matter of minutes. Ten thousand miles away, Karen Ross, the Congo Project Supervisor, watches a gruesome video transmission of the aftermath: a camp destroyed, tents crushed and torn, equipment scattered in the mud alongside dead bodies - all motionless except for one moving image - a grainy, dark, man-shaped blur.

Macbeth is a general for Scotland who has been prophesied to be the future King of Scotland. Rather than wait for this prophecy to take hold of its own accord, and after taking the advice of his power-hungry wife, he murders the current king and takes his place. But it doesn’t take long for tremendous guilt and fear to take hold of him, and turn his reign into one of tyranny and brutality as he and Lady Macbeth commit more and more crimes to avoid the consequences coming for them.